Acquisition overview

Matrox Design Assistant can acquire images from cameras that have been added to your project. By default, an image is grabbed and either queued (buffered) until the Camera step is executed in the flowchart, or discarded (if not using image queues and the next image is grabbed). After the Camera step, the image is available to your project. There are several methods of initiating an image grab; various camera settings and flowchart setups can accommodate triggering a grab based on external hardware signals, communication with controllers (PLCs) over a network, the Trigger step, or flowchart/operator view events.

The Cameras page of the Platform Configuration dialog allows you to add, rename, or delete the physical cameras used by your project.

Each physical camera is configured using a PhysicalCameraN page that directly controls the basic acquisition options, which include configuring camera allocation. For GigE/USB3 Vision cameras and Matrox smart cameras, further options include, but are not limited to, exposure timing and triggering. The camera's inputs are typically set prior to project deployment and remain constant; however, platform configuration binding and the CameraSettings step allow you to change your camera's inputs at runtime. This allows you to grab several images with a range of exposures and lighting conditions, and to choose from multiple triggering sources.

The Camera step allows you to acquire an image from a specified camera source, optionally associate it with a calibration file to correct any distortions, and generate a second output image that has been physically corrected (warped) according to the calibration mappings. With the Camera step, you can enable remapping, which arranges to convert acquired images to the appropriate bit depth for steps that link to the Camera step.

In addition, the Camera step allows you to load a series of images (image set) to test your project against images representing difficult or complex situations (for example, images that are difficult to read, slightly off-center, or error-filled). For more information about images from disk, see Chapter 29: Acquisition using image sets.

During design-time, the Camera step's display view allows you to view the acquired image. Use the Camera Live () toolbar button in the Project toolbar to see the camera's real-time view. Note that this is only available if triggering is not enabled on the camera. With the live view, you can adjust lighting, aperture, and focus of your physical camera, without having to loop through the flowchart. When the Camera step is first added to the project, or the project is first opened and the Camera step has not run, the display view for the Camera step is blank. To view the image being acquired, select the Camera step and click the green triangle in the image, or use the Run to selected step () toolbar button in the Project toolbar. Once the Camera step is run, you can overlay the image with non-destructive annotations from other steps in your project. For information on step annotations, see the Annotations section in the Display view reference chapter.

While your project often has only one Camera step, there are several ways of dealing with image acquisition from multiple cameras.